The 100% Truth About Learning Anything While You Sleep

Sitting back with earphones while a tape or CD plays seems like an effortless way to learn. You imagine your brain to be like a sponge. It would soak up information the way a kitchen sponge soaks up spills.

Trouble is, the learning process doesn’t really work that way, especially when it comes to a topic that’s slightly complicated. The learning process has to be more active than that. The brain has to make connections. Making connections takes a little work. Making connections between the material you’re trying to learn is an active process.

Most people know this, too, though they get tempted through intrinsic laziness. It sounds easy this way, right? Surely you retain something?

This is a form of instruction known as passive learning. Other forms of passive learning include listening to lectures and rote memorization. With passive learning, the student doesn’t receive any feedback from an instructor. The brain is exposed to the material and the hope is that something sticks.

Passive learning can’t be your whole strategy, not if you actually hope to master the material.

It can, however, have its place.

The trouble is separating the hype from the truth.

Reinforce A Foreign Language With Passive Learning

Language tapes are available on many music streaming platforms like Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, and Amazon Music. You can listen to language recordings as you walk through your neighborhood, do household chores, or wash the dog. You can also listen as you fall asleep. Sometimes it’s hard because your attention has to wander away from the lesson so you can be safe or get the job done. Sometimes other noises interfere with the lesson you’re trying to hear, like when a loud truck passes by and you’re walking by the side of a road.

The bedroom is a perfect place to listen to these kinds of recordings.

You might have to listen to the same tape twice — or even more — but being able to do two things at once is a pretty powerful benefit.

This passive learning reinforcement strategy works for more than foreign language and classroom lectures. You can listen to podcasts, books on tape, and you can even make your own recordings by reading into a recorder, many programs of which are available on the smartphone.

The key, however, is that it’s best to pursue topics which you’re already well acquainted with. You’re rounding your knowledge out, and nothing more.

The Biggest Benefit To Passive Learning

The biggest benefit to passive learning is enthusiasm. Actively trying to make connections between disparate material takes work. You can get tired of this pretty easily. On the other hand, when you’re learning passively, you’re getting benefits from the activity that you’re pursuing along with passive learning. You’re getting the exercise, the exposure to the sunlight, the drive to or from work, or the rest. Maybe you’re getting a clean dog. Whatever. That has to make you feel efficient. Feeling efficient makes you feel good.

Seeing if this kind of passive learning works for you is perfect for doing a study of one.

The key is to be as objective as possible when gauging the effects of your personal experiment. This helps you reinforce the behavior to yourself.

If you’ve been learning a foreign language, try practicing the language on real people after refreshing your neural synapses with language tapes. Rate the experiences from one to five. Compare the reactions with when you haven’t been listening to the language recordings. When I did this, my interactions in the foreign language were very positive. The enthusiasm that passive learning brought to the process was the difference maker.

If you’re taking a class, try listening to old lectures of material that’s going to be on your final. Or listen to current material as presented by another instructor or source. Bedtime passive learning is about mastery. Information mastery is about memory consolidation.

It’s a wonderful thing as long as it doesn’t interfere with the primary purpose of sleeping, and that’s sleep.